by Hugh Thomson
For a moment I wondered whether I’d stumbled on that rare thing, an archaeological dig, but the man turned out to be a member of the local model aeroplane flying club.
I admired his model aeroplanes, which were all in the boxes. He told me he came to the same spot every day, whatever the weather.
‘The barrow must be a convenient place to fly them from,’ I suggested.
‘What barrow?’
Almost completely forgotten today, for 4,000 years White Sheet Hill was a convenient beacon for first Neolithic, then Bronze Age and finally Celtic travellers, all of whom left their mark on the hilltop. There was a Neolithic causeway, various other Bronze Age barrows and one large Iron Age hill-fort in close proximity to one another. The local water board had sympathetically built a small reservoir almost on top of the Iron Age fort – which seemed gratuitous when they had an entire open hillside near by to choose from.
It was as I headed on from the hill over Cranborne Chase that the magic took hold. I had a book in my knapsack, which I had referred to frequently since the coast. Ever since I had managed to find an old copy of Ancient Trackways of Wessex, written in 1965 by the husband-and-wife team of H W Timperley and Edith Brill, I had wanted to follow some of the old drovers’ ways they laboriously tracked. It was only with their help that I had negotiated a route through the complexities of the Dorset valleys, as the Icknield Way has many variants.
Most of the time they kept to a dedicated route-finder approach, for which the reader needed an OS map beside them at all times. But when it came to this stretch, which they described as ‘the Harrow Way’, a loop of the Icknield, they allowed themselves a rare moment of lyricism:
This is the most splendid and – in feeling if not in actual number of feet – the highest stretch of the Harrow Way, and one of the loneliest downland walks in Wiltshire.
The wind was buffeting around my head as I advanced down the old lane into the wide-open expanses. I could see for miles and there was not a single person. For Cranborne Chase as it leads into Salisbury Plain is the vortex of England, the great emptiness at its heart, sucking it in.
This was where Arthur and his knights finally disintegrated: the setting for the battle of Camlann where Mordred and Arthur killed each other. Malory tells it all with a bleak beauty: how it was resolved that the two armies ‘should meet upon a down beside Salisbury, and not far from the seaside’.
Throughout the Morte d’Arthur, Malory shows a keen sense of geography, going out of his way to give the epic a scope ranging right across the British Isles, from the Orkneys to Kent. At one point Lancelot offers to make a bare-shirted journey on foot from Sandwich to Carlisle as penance for having unwittingly killed Gareth. It is after this accidental killing that Gareth’s brother Gawain swears vengeance on Lancelot and will not allow Arthur to make peace, however much the king would like to; Arthur has a glorious aside to the effect that ‘I can always get another queen, but not such a brotherhood of knights.’
For the final battle on Salisbury Plain, Malory must surely have drawn on his own experience of civil war of the most vicious sort during the Wars of the Roses. He is careful to show that the conflict was not an inevitable outcome of opposing views, but came rather from a series of very human failings and misunderstandings. What other writer would allow his king to faint with the knowledge of the carnage that lay ahead? There are more manly tears in the last book of Le Morte d’Arthur than a Mills and Boon novel: Malory’s knights are in touch with their feminine side. But they are also capable of creating violent mayhem.
I thought of Yeats’s poem ‘Meditation in Time of Civil War’ in which, while recounting violence similar, the poet notices with most intensity the honeybees building their nest outside his window. Malory likewise tells us that the conflict begins in spring, when every heart should ‘flourysheth and burgoneth’. Instead a ‘grete angur’ has been born. As Yeats wrote of his own time, suddenly there was ‘more substance in our enmities than in our love’.
Whereas Malory’s main source for his account of the battle, the earlier French thirteenth-century Le Mort le Roi Artu, makes much of the fact that Merlin had once foretold that the kingdom of Logres would end in a cataclysmic battle on Salisbury Plain, Malory omits this prophecy completely; as he does much of the lengthy heraldic list of kings and their exploits in the battle chronicled by the anonymous French writer.
He keeps his description terse, like a foreign correspondent, but makes sure that the figure of 100,000 dead stands out, a number that was not inconceivable by the European standards of his own time.
What he does introduce is a human detail of startling simplicity. The two armies have originally agreed to meet in truce on the Plain but, as each distrusts the other, they are equally ready to draw their swords in defence if the other side should raise theirs. An adder comes out of the bushes and bites a knight on the ankle, who not unnaturally responds by killing it, and ‘thoghte none othir harme’. Cue trumpets, horns and bloodshed.
Malory describes the chaos of such a battle. ‘There was but rushynge and rydynge, foynynge [thrusting] and strykynge.’ When the dust clears, the survivors can hardly see each other for the bodies. Arthur kills Mordred, but in a Mexican stand-off the usurper manages a last, mortal blow at the same time, and the king falls to the cold earth.
As night arrives, the grievously wounded Sir Lucan sees looters and robbers creep out by moonlight to strip dead knights of their rings and jewels, and kill any who are injured for their horse harnesses and riches. A time of darkness has come.
I spent many hours walking on the Plain, which is not as flat as it sounds. W H Hudson once compared it to an open hand, ‘with Salisbury in the hollow of the palm, placed nearest the wrist, and the five valleys which cut through it as the five spread fingers’.
After crossing over one of these valley ridges, I came to an old beech copse, with a holly tree at its entrance and more brush-holly underpinning the trees. Called ‘Hanging Langford Camp’, the ancient woodland settlement dated from the late Iron Age and the Arthurian Romano-British period. Brooches from that time had been found under the trees, particularly when any had been uprooted by the wind. From there, the old lane swept down out of the copse towards the bottom of the Wylye Valley along one of the hardest of flint roads I had yet walked on, a penitential track.
What I liked about following this old road across England was not just the necklace of prehistoric sites that accompanied it, but the way they could be so hidden unless you knew where to look. Brush away what appeared to be a normal bit of British countryside, as here, and to my right, hidden under the beaches of Castle Hill, was a tumulus; I had just left a Roman camp and road on the ridge behind me, along with the earthworks of Grim’s Dyke. And now I came over the brow of West Hill, again with its early earthworks, I could see the Langford Lakes laid out before me, next to the medieval village of Steeple Langford.
The lakes were protected as a bird reserve and the terns were circling overhead with their swept-back wings. The odd shaft of light through the dark clouds was picked up by the surface of the water. Coarse fisherman had set up day camps along the reed banks.
Malory never identifies the lake to which Arthur returns his sword when he is dying. The king asks Sir Bedivere, one of his stewards and one of the few survivors of the battle, to take Excalibur and throw it in the lake. Twice Sir Bedivere takes the jewel-encrusted sword but cannot bring himself to waste it in the water. Only on the third time of asking does he not deny Arthur, and throws the sword in, ‘after wrapping the belt about the hilt’, Malory adds, with his usual concern for detail. He sees it grasped by the Lady of the Lake’s hand as it rises up out of the water. Again, Malory keeps a telling detail from one of his sources: the hand shakes the sword three times and ‘brandishes’ it, before withdrawing below the surface.
As an ending that leaves the reader wanting more, it has few rivals. The sword is never explained. Arthur’s body is borne off to ‘the vale of Avalon’ on a barge crew
ed by black-hooded queens.
When Lancelot learns that Guinevere too is dead, ‘he wepte not greteleye, but syghed’. Malory, sitting in his prison tower as he wrote, waiting for a reprieve that never came from Edward IV for his part in the Wars of the Roses, wanted to achieve a sense of elegy and of loss, of an England that had wasted a golden age through the quarrelsomeness of human nature.
I had been sitting by the banks of the Langford Lakes for no more than a minute when a kingfisher landed on a bare branch just a few feet away from me. I had often waited for hours to see them along stretches of the Thames. This was a gift. It gave its characteristic sweet, bitten-off cry. A slash of turquoise ran down its back, a slash that is difficult to see in flight or unless it is close. The violently red stalks of dogwood along the banks made it stand out even more.
I looked out over the water. In Greek legend, the kingfisher is the bird that harbingers the ‘halcyon days’, those days of calm before a storm. With the wildfowl circling and the strange reflections of both sun and dark clouds on the surface, it was easy to imagine the Arthurian end sequence as having taken place here.
Before I could get too carried away by the moment, one of the fishermen disabused me: ‘They’re old gravel pits. Only been filled with water for the last fifty years, if that.’
*
William Cobbett had spent parts of his childhood here in Steeple Langford, so when it came to doing his Rural Rides, it was natural that he should return. He was disappointed:
When I got to Steeple Langford, I found no public-house, and I found it a much more miserable place than I had remembered it. The Steeple, to which it owed its distinctive appellation, was gone; and the place altogether seemed to me to be very much altered for the worse.
Cobbett, like many a distinguished British traveller – Smollett and Johnson come to mind – loved a good disappointment. The Rural Rides are full of them. He managed to find the Berkshire Downs, which lay ahead of me and in some ways were the treasure trove of Wessex, bleak and equally unsatisfactory. What he liked was a good valley, like that of the Wiltshire Avon.
But his trenchant approach to poor working conditions was admirable. I particularly liked his rant when he visited the nearby village of Milton Lilbourne about how capitalist writers like Adam Smith and his followers – ‘The Scotch feelosofers’, as he called them – could do with a spot of manual labour to appreciate why the working man might occasionally need a holiday:
The Scotch feelosofers, who seem all to have been, by nature, formed for negro-drivers, have an insuperable objection to all those establishments and customs which occasion holidays. They call them a great hindrance, a great bar to industry, a great drawback from ‘national wealth’. I wish each of these unfeeling fellows had a spade put into his hand for ten days, only ten days, and that he were compelled to dig only just as much as one of the common labourers at Fulham. The metaphysical gentleman would, I believe, soon discover the use of holidays!
But why should men, why should any men, work hard? Why, I ask, should they work incessantly, if working part of the days of the week be sufficient? Why should the people at Milton, for instance, work incessantly, when they now raise food and clothing and fuel and every necessary to maintain well five times their number? Why should they not have some holidays? And, pray, say, thou conceited Scotch feelosofer, how the ‘national wealth’ can be increased by making these people work incessantly, that they may raise food and clothing, to go to feed and clothe people who do not work at all?
Cobbett set off on his rural rides not long after he had been living in the United States, effectively exiled there for his political views, and saw England with fresh eyes on his return at the end of 1819, just after the Peterloo massacre had given fresh impetus to the need for reform, and the new Corn Laws were making landowners rich at the expense of their workers.
He made a point of talking to as many farmers as possible, often staying with them, and was interested in new farming methods, like the revolutionary seed drill that Jethro Tull had suggested (Cobbett republished Tull’s book, Horse Hoeing Husbandry); he inveighed against the potato, seeing it as a dangerous fad which the Tory government of the time was trying to promote; and above all he sympathised with the poor lot of the farm labourer, disliking the ‘new rich’, like the Baring family who had made their money from banking and had now ‘bought into the country side’ without understanding it.
God knows what Cobbett would have made of much of southern England now: chips sold in every pub and a banker in every large estate; a patrician ruling Tory Party; a venal House of Commons whose members had just been exposed to public condemnation for their abuse of expenses, and were driven by the dictates of lobbyists; and a victory for free-market capitalism across all the political parties that would have made ‘the Scotch feelosofers’ ecstatic.
It would be wonderful to have his campaigning and humane journalism lance the boils and excesses of the current age, just as he did those of the early nineteenth century.
Chapter 2
The Sun and the Clock
‘The clock should be read by the sunshine, not the sun timed by the clock.’
Richard Jefferies
I ARRIVE AT Stonehenge towards sunset, walking across the Plain, coming from the west: which is strangely appropriate. In the popular imagination, the stones are associated with the east, with the rising of the sun for the summer solstice, when travellers, pagans, Druids and partygoers descend on Stonehenge to see the dawn. But in recent years archaeologists have suggested that the winter solstice sunset in the west was celebrated more: the turning point of the year on 20 December, when the long nights start to shorten; the reason Christmas became such a significant festival, building on pre-Christian traditions. As I know from my studies in Peru (where again it was the winter solstice that was most important for the Incas), the sun sets on the winter solstice along the same axis that it rises for the summer one, so the orientation is the same.
This confusion over solstices is important because it gives rise to the misconception that Stonehenge celebrates the dawn – for which read rebirth and renewal. One can almost hear the snare drums and African choirs of the New Age ravers kick in.
But Stonehenge may have had a far darker, sunset orientation. Despite recent findings by archaeologists, no one associates the site with death. We now know from recent excavations that this was one of the largest Neolithic burial grounds in Britain, and used as such for centuries. The New Age ravers who flock here each summer are dancing on a graveyard.
They have already started to arrive for the solstice, although there are still some days before it is due. Among them are the Druids who lead the solstice celebrations. While New Age travellers fondly like to imagine that they are re-enacting Druid ceremonies at a Druid site, this is historically incorrect. The stones were erected many thousands of years before the Celtic prophet-priests became active around 500 BC. While perfectly possible that the Druids may have been drawn to the stones, they would have done so much in the same way as today’s New Age travellers – as pilgrims hoping to tap into the spiritual energy of their forebears.
I see the travellers’ vans lurking in lay-bys and along some of the sandy tracks that lead off the busy roads besieging Stonehenge in a pincer of tarmac: the A303 and A344 thunder by unbelievably close, the latter almost clipping one of the outer megaliths, the thirty-five-ton ‘Heelstone’. An unattractive wire fence separates the stones from the cars that stream past.
For Stonehenge represents all that is best and worst about England.
There is the sheer imaginative leap of the decision, whether taken in a day or over several generations, to turn a ring of wooden posts into a circle of gigantic sarsen stones with – the literally crowning glory – stone lintels notched and raised onto them: a triumph of spirituality, of engineering, of ingenuity and of the sheer bloody-mindedness that has distinguished much later English history.
And there is the desultory way in which they have sinc
e been treated, with a disdain inherited from the Romans for anything prehistoric: first left partially to collapse when under private ownership; then, when ‘saved for the nation’ in 1918 by a benefactor, the nation repaying that gift with the indifference of someone who has not had to pay. The odd stone was propped up if in danger of falling. Archaeological digs were given scant resources and no single museum established, at the site or elsewhere, to display and interpret any findings. In my lifetime, plans have come and gone to reroute the absurdly intrusive roads – not difficult, as they are passing over a largely empty plain. On almost the day I arrived, the government announced it would withdraw the funding it had previously promised to landscape the site and house the findings in a Visitors’ Centre.
Worst of all, we have fenced off the actual stones so they cannot be visited, but only viewed from afar, patrolling around them along a ‘designated walkway’. This provides fine distant views of the stones but is hardly an immersive experience. Nor is it necessary on the spurious ‘health and safety’ grounds that are usually quoted. If visitors can approach to within inches of paintings at national galleries, surely they can do the same to far less vulnerable stone blocks.
The decision to fence them off was made in 1978, a low point of the century for much of Britain, with its strife and winter of discontent, in response to the ‘Free Stonehenge’ festivals and regular invasion of the site. In retrospect, one can understand the political symbolism. The government of the day was not able to control the unions, but at least it could stop long-haired hippies invading a national monument; never mind that the monument had been open to all for the previous 4,000 years. Like so many restrictive laws, it has proved harder to remove than enforce. In these less confrontational times, when the Chief Druid sits on a consultative body with the Wiltshire police, it should long ago have been rescinded.